The general aim is to extend our research of many years on the early perceptual-attentionl-cognitive development of infants through promising recent or new approaches, including: (a) Determining the earliest maturation of visual functioning in preterm infants by visual preference testing along with electrophysiological recordings. (b) Separating the subsequent contributions to the development of new or improved visual discrimination abilities of the "extra" premature experience, and of further maturation of eye brain that has also occurred in infants born at term. (c) Tracing longitudinally during the early months the development of successively attentional prepotency among a series of pattern variations arranged in a proposed developmental order in both normal and neural-mental high-risk infants. (d) Recording electrophysiological data and alerting-orienting reactions for the purposes of confirming and understanding the significance of previous differential fixation time data; of showing possible unlearned neural discrimination and arousal processes; and of specifying the nature and origin of early visual retardations we have found to be predictive of later perceptual-cognitive disabilities.